I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I put diesel in a petrol hire car at Geilo. Three hours late, smelling of fuel and shame, I finally crunched up the gravel track to our little cabin in Uvdal, Buskerud. The chap who'd towed me, a weather-beaten fellow called Arne, had already rung ahead to explain my predicament. I stepped out of the replacement vehicle to find three people waiting on the porch, which felt rather like arriving at a surprise party where everyone knows you've done something stupid.

The owner, Eldrid, was a stout woman in her sixties with grey hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to be holding her opinions in place. She looked me up and down, said "You are the petrol man," and burst out laughing. Her husband Kjell stood behind her, saying nothing, smoking something that definitely wasn't tobacco and squinting at me with what I initially read as suspicion but later understood to be simply how his face was arranged. He had, I learned, squinted at everyone since 1987 when a welding accident rearranged his eyebrows.

Their neighbour Torunn had apparently come over specifically to witness my arrival. She'd brought a Tupperware of something brown and introduced herself by pressing it into my hands and declaring, "This is blood pudding. You will need it." I never did establish why I would need it. She returned every morning for six days, always with Tupperware, never with explanation. One day it contained pickled herring. Another, what she called "old cheese" with a pride that suggested mould was a personal achievement.

Eldrid showed me round the cabin with the brisk efficiency of someone who had done this twelve thousand times but still found fresh ways to be disappointed. The sauna, she explained, had been built by Kjell in 1994 and had electrocuted nobody "recently." The water came from a mountain stream and tasted of peat and something she described as "the old ways," which I chose not to investigate. When I admired the view of the valley, she snorted and said, "Yes, very nice, but in winter you cannot see it for darkness and despair." This was July.

Kjell spoke his first words to me on day three. I was attempting to split logs behind the cabin, doing it badly, when he materialised from behind a tree like some sort of Scandinavian spirit. "You hold the axe like a tired woman," he observed. He then took it from me, split seventeen logs in thirty seconds, handed it back, and vanished again. We had perhaps four more conversations all week. The longest was when he informed me, unprompted, that he didn't trust goats because "they have the eyes of people who owe money."

The village shop was run by a chap called Per who had been to Leeds once in 1982 and considered this sufficient qualification to discuss British politics at length. He had strong opinions about Yorkshire pudding that I found surprisingly well-informed. His wife, who I never saw but heard referred to constantly as "she who prices the fish," seemed to wield the actual power in this arrangement. Per spoke of her with the nervous reverence usually reserved for volatile weather systems.

There was a fellow who fished the lake each morning, a retired schoolteacher called Magnus who wore the same green jumper regardless of temperature and shouted at ospreys. "Thieves!" he would bellow, shaking his fist at birds who merely looked at him. He told me he'd been coming to Uvdal since before the road was paved, which he considered the beginning of certain moral declines. "Now everyone comes," he said, with a disgust that clearly included me. "Before, only people who meant it."

On our final evening, Eldrid brought over proper coffee and actually sat with us. She talked about growing up in the valley when the nearest doctor was a day's ski away, about winters that swallowed houses whole, about the particular loneliness of places where everyone knows your business but nobody mentions it directly. Kjell joined us briefly, accepted a biscuit, and announced that my log-splitting had improved to "acceptable for a tourist." I felt genuinely moved.

We left the following morning, Torunn appearing at dawn with a final Tupperware containing, she said, "something for the road." It was more blood pudding. I accepted it with the gravity the moment seemed to require. Some connections, I reflected, driving away past Magnus and his shouting, past Per opening his shop, past landscapes that made my ordinary life feel very small and far away, are built on nothing more than showing up, being slightly useless, and accepting whatever people offer you in plastic containers.